Thursday, April 17, 2008

My Great World is a free photo sharing service with an emphasis on geography. My Great World categorizes images by the country in which the photograph was taken. Users can submit their own images and rank the quality of images on a 1-10 scale. Visitors to My Great World can search for images by country or by photographers. Finally, registered users can swap images and network through My Great World's messaging system.

Applications for EducationMy Great World is a nice resource for students doing research assignments on various countries. The search by country option is a nice way to find images of that country. The advantage of searching by country on My Great World over an image search on Google is that it removes some of the guess work and search refinement process younger students sometimes experience when using Google to search for images.

Online safety and privacy is an extremely important consideration when selecting a web-based application to use with students. PB Wiki, a great and free wiki service, is offering a webinar for educators about online safety for students. The first topic of the webinar is "practical tips for teachers to be safe with their students while using wikis." Fittingly, as this webinar is being hosted by PB Wiki, the agenda for the webinar is written in a wiki and visitors can add their suggests for topics of discussion.

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts about PB Wiki, PB Wiki has a great wiki through which teachers can share ideas about using wikis in education.

Regardless of your position on evolution v. creation, Charles Darwin and his work is historically significant. Now through the University of Cambridge most of Darwin's writings and sketches are available online for free. The manuscripts and images are cataloged for easy searching or browsing.

Application for EducationThe online Darwin Library is good resource for finding primary documents and teaching primary document research. The contents of the library can be used by students to examine the methods Darwin used and the development of his theories.

Click is a current exhibit available online from the Brooklyn Museum. Click is a collection of photographs that the museum is inviting the world to evaluate. Anyone, regardless of their art education or lack thereof, can evaluate the images through the Click website. The evaluation process is simple. All a user has to do is move a marker on a sliding scale to submit their evaluation.

The image below shows the sliding scale used to evaluate each photograph.

Applications for EducationClick could be used by art teachers as a discussion starter among students. Each student could evaluate a set of photographs and share their opinions and reasoning for each evaluation. Users do have to register to participate in Click, but the registration is quick and simple as it asks for nothing more than a valid email address.

Pikistore lets users create, for free, an online tee-shirt store. Pikistore collects a small commission on each tee-shirt sale, but otherwise charges users nothing. If your store doesn't sell any tee-shirts your cost is nothing for having a Pikistore store. Pikistore could be a great way to run a school fund raiser without having to purchase products in advance. Users of the Pikistore service can design their own tee-shirts for sale in their own Pikistore. This could be a great way to design and sell a tee-shirt for a specific school event like homecoming or class trip.